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Acting Studio: YAT MALMGREN`S FAMOUS MOVEMENT PSYCHOLOGY:

Acting Studio Berlin: Introduction & Intermediate Workshop June 2018 click here

Malmgren was a key figure at the Drama Centre London along with co-founder Christopher Fettes, John and Catherine Blatchley, Harold Lang and Catherine Clouzot. His teaching approach drew from the applied psychology of movement developed by Laban. Malmgren’s method of character development is concerned with a technique for expressing the inner state of a character through movement, and is a synthesis of Laban’s theory of movement expression, C.G. Jung’s character types (published in 1923) and key principles of acting established by Constantin Stanislavski. Malmgren taught a number of famous actors including: Sean Connery, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Anthony Hopkins, Andrew Tiernan, Geraldine James, Helen McCrory, Paul Bettany, Russell Brand, Anne-Marie Duff, John Simm, Sean Harris, Andrew Pleavin, Diane Cilento, Michael Fassbender and Tom Hardy.“ (Q: Wikipedia)

„The place where you stand, how you use your space, is the number-one priority. How you stand in relation to other people in scenes, how you dance with them – that´s what it´s all about“ – Sean Connery. Yat Malmgren teached Sean Connery how to move, how to position his body in space in such a way as to make for maximum dramatic impact in any given scene…(Q: SEAN CONNERY by C. Bray)

„Lang coerced almost everyone he knew into attending Malmgren’s movement classes – students were to include Sean Connery, Diane Cilento, Natasha Parry, Patricia Neal, Gillian Lynne, Anthony Hopkins, Brain Bedford, Elizabeth Fielding and the directors Peter Brook, Tony Richardson, Bill Gaskill, Michael Blakemore, Seth Holt and Alexander Mackendrick….Later in 1954, Malmgren was invited by Devine to work at the Royal Court and by Rudolf Laban to join the staff of the Art of Movement Studio in Addlestone, Surrey. The next year he assisted Brook and Gielgud on The Tempest…………The following year, Laurence Olivier invited Malmgren to undertake movement training of all National Theatre actors.“ (Q: The Guardian)

„This, Connery had made plain, was the most demanding role he had yet attempted. He needed all the help he could get. Then why, said Cilento, didnt he come along and meet Yat Malmgren? (At that time Cilento said Connery was walking like a body builder.)….Yat Malmgren has some claim for being the man most responsible for givinng the world audience the Sean Connery it adores. For he it was who taught Connery how to move – how to position his body in such a way as to for maximum dramatic impact in any given scene. Swedish by birth, Malmgren was to be Britain´s answer to Stanislavsky and the Actor´s Studio – an aesthetic theorist convinced that acting was something that came from within the actor rather than from the world´s effect on him or her…Malmgren´s self proclaimed aim was to „help the actor raise the consciousness, and control the forces that determine the expressive qualities of movements, gesture and speech“, in order to equip him or her „with that sensitivity of body to emotional impulses which is the basic condition of every act of transformation“. (Q: SEAN CONNERY by C. Bray)

„Yat took Laban’s notation into acting. We studied movement psychology and its notation. We didn’t use the notation particularly, but the notation is based on principles of putting psychological concepts into space, into action, into the physical world…“ (Q: COLIN FIRTH-London, Backstage)

„…because at the school that I went to [Drama Centre London], we dealt very much in character types, which is actually a very Jungian type of teaching. We discussed how there are „near“ characters in life—people that are sort of blinkered by their environments or what they’ve been taught. People that are homophobic, for example, would be „near“ personalities. Then you have a „stable“ personality, which would be more like a politician or a school teacher, and a „adream“ personality, who can be self-obsessed or self-indulgent to a certain extent, and who, as „dream“ suggests, isn’t totally hooked in to the real normality that everyone else is living in. Within that, you have feeling-sensing, and sensing-feeling, and I think my senses come before my emotions.“ (Q: MICHAEL FASSBENDER-Slant Film Magazine)

 

Acting Studio – Workshop with James Kemp – Yat Malmgren – Character Analysis & Movement Psychology

James Kemp trained at Drama Centre London, subsequently pursued an acting career which encompassed a number of long running West End shows. In 1998 James was invited back to work alongside Yat Malmgren in the teaching of Movement Psychology, and upon the retirement of Malmgren in 2001 he inherited his work and further developed this field of study and practise through International Workshops and Theatre including Schott Acting Studio, Berlin; and as an acting tutor at LAMDA (London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art) and as ‚Laban Consultant‘ at the Young Vic Theatre. He worked as Acting Supervisor on the Internationally Award winning Czech film Hany (2014).

His many successful students have included: Michael Fassbender, Tom Hardy, Emilia Clarke, Stephen Wight, Jaime Murray, Gwendoline Christie, Morven Christie, Damien Molony, Tamla Kari, Jodie McNee, Lucy Briggs-Owen and many others. His students have won acting honours from: BAFTA, Venice International Film Festival, British Independent Film Awards (BIFA), Laurence Olivier Awards, London Evening, London Evening Standard Theatre Awards, London Film Critics Circle Awards, Los Angles Film Critics Association Awards amongst many others. Their Nominations have included American Academy Awards (Oscar), European Film Awards, Screen Actors Guild Awards, Golden Globes Awards plus many others.

„At the heart of the work is the concept that we think with our bodies. That our bodies are revelatory of our inner workings, our psyche, of our thoughts and feelings. Therefore if we could learn to harness and manifest our inner sensations and in a precise way control and express them through our bodies we would be able to share every inner desire, want, thought or emotion with a watching audience. And in turn that audience would be able to ‘read’ our thoughts, to ‘read’ our character and be thoroughly engaged in our dramatic lives.“

More: www.schott-acting-studio.de

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